Artist's Statement and Biography Greening the World

These paintings of closely seen nature in the form of moths, butterflies and flowers and joyous sunny or stormy landscapes are my response to the state of planet Earth at this moment. I immerse myself in nature to escape the pain I feel for the creatures of the world, but in the periphery of my vision, I cannot avoid seeing that the storm is gathering. The storm is destructive, dark, and unknowable; it represents the power for creation and destruction of the divine spirit at work in nature.

I've learned to recognize that there is intelligence in the simplest of things, and that it is possible to take comfort in the browsing of bees, the texture of bark, the acorn’s gleaming body, the fur of a moth. All of nature connects in interwoven patterns and influence.

Out of apparent destruction comes the renewal of life, just as the Lodge Pole Pine sprouts only when the cone is exposed to fire. Sometimes we must walk through the darkness to see the light. That your world is in agony is no reason to turn your back on it, or to try to escape into private “spiritual” pursuits.

This series of paintings is in a way a voice of Nature speaking through the language of symbol and metaphor. There is a clear still voice of the natural world, singing sighing and whispering all around us. Even so, in our culture the idea that humans are profoundly dependent upon the life support systems of this small moist green planet is often rejected.

BIOGRAPHY:

Jo-Ann Lowney was born in 1948 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. As a child she lived in Europe, spent her high school years in Miami and in her twenties moved to Portland, Maine where she attended the Main College of Art. She then studied five years with the National Academician, Frank Mason, at The Art Student’s League of New York. The atmosphere of the League was as formative for Lowney as it was for so many artists, their ghosts haunt it still, Pollock, lumbering around as a busboy in the school's cafeteria, was very aware of visits from Arshile Gorky, who had once taught at the league and still dropped by for coffee. Painters like Rothko, Robert Henri, Georgea O’Keef, Reginold Marsh were all students there. Lowney met her husband, painter Joel Coplin while attending the League classes in New York City. Since 1986, they have made their home and studios at the East Side Art artist’s community in Mesa, Arizona

In 1995 Jo-Ann Lowney was awarded the Visual Art Fellowship in Two Dimensional Media by the Arizona Commission on the Arts. In 1996 she was awarded an Artists in Residency Grant by the Arizona Commission on the Arts for the mural project, A History of Superstition Mountain.

Lowney’s richly painted visionary landscapes and her figurative bronzes evoke a sense of the magic of the natural world and the potency of the human creative unconscious. Her work is featured in many private and corporate collections in this country and abroad, including the McDonald’s Corporation, Nordstrums in Scottsdale, and Universal Studios in Hollywood, California.